The Adoption
by lonaj
Summary: Helo finds a new home.


Warning -- this is NOT a happy story.

I was sent a challenge to write a story about what happened to Helo after Sharon left him.  I do not usually write stories like this and I am not very happy with the results.  But I figured, what the heck.  I'll post it and move on.

The Adoption

God wrought and He saw that His work was good.  The human infection had almost been eradicated.  Leaping from one of His base stars to the next, God was both the communication and the process.  He was God and in His supreme power, the assimilation of all things Cylon.  Soon there would be no reminder that He had been created by humans.  They were not had not been worthy of creating God; they did not love every molecule of the universe with a Cylon's uniform fidelity.  They did not even love each other.

Reaching the two base stars stationed at Ragnar, God absorbed recent history files.  The low-threat, unarmed battlestar Galactica had rearmed and escaped the cleansing with a miscellaneous collection of civilian craft and enough humans to re-infest the galaxy within a hundred generations.

As a Cylon he had no emotional reaction other than love, but He immediately suspended all non-essential subroutines and reassigned all available resources to the situation.  These last few humans had to be squashed now when they were still few, weak and vulnerable.

Analyzing the problem, God realized the humans had somehow detected the biosynthetic Cylon on Ragnar.  He needed an even better simulacrum for further operations, a truly human Cylon.  Suspending his fleet's last extermination operations, He began the search for a suitable candidate.

Towering pines hid most of the Caprican night sky from the small party of human survivors.  After watching their last hope for rescue take off six days earlier, the group had dwindled in the long struggle into the mountains.  Each morning they had woken up to find that a few more had vanished, apparently trusting to isolation to save them rather than human companionship.  Two of the oldest refugees had died from heart attacks.  Another had taken his own life, jumping off a cliff in that last climb to this remote, nameless mountain valley.  When they'd started out from the plains, there had been thirty-two.  Now there were twenty, and one of them the Colonial soldier Helo.

He has a will of iron, Doctor Ramosn thought as he mopped at Helo's dripping wet forehead with a wrung out rag.  The soldier had led them up here but soon he would die.  Earlier he'd screamed when the doctor had changed the dressing on his ugly leg wound, but the effort had quickly worn him out and now all Helo did was groan and shiver his life away.

If the doctor had had a hospital at his disposal, he could have saved Helo's leg and life.  But all the doctor had was the MedicKit from the departed Raptor and even that was almost empty.  He'd given Helo the last of the painkillers this morning and the rest of the anti-inflammatory two days ago.  The dressing he'd just applied had been the last.

"Let him die," Markelot said from where he stood by the fire.  Helo had shot the bull-necked Markelot off the Raptor's wing with his signal flare pistol, putting a ragged hole in the man's suit coat and a first degree burn on his upper arm, painful but far from life threatening.  The doctor had given Markselot a salve and told him to wrap it with his handkerchief.

Helo hadn't let them build fires on their journey here.  He said the Cylons might see them, but today after he passed out Markelot had built one anyway.

"He'll die whether I let him or not," Ramosn told him.  Some of the faces around the campfire looked sad at this news, but most were too exhausted to hold expression.  They stared into the fire, their eyes only half open.

Markelot turned and fiddled with the three fish baking on sticks.  "Then he won't need any of this," he said.  It was the first fresh food they'd had for three days.  They'd been living on crackers and cookies scavenged from mountain cabins.

Ramosn didn't answer.  He stood up and cocked his head, listening.  He turned slowly until he faced back the way they'd come.  Yes, there it was again and building rapidly, the rumble of an aircraft.  "Put that frakking fire out!" he screamed.

It was too late.  The narrow slice of night sky above them had filled with metal and flashing lights, and there wasn't anything human that big left on Caprica.  It had to be Cylon.  As Helo had told them to do, they scattered in every direction running as fast as they could.  Only Helo remained, lying next to the fire, shuddering in his fever and moaning to the night.

Helo felt safe in the deep dark of unconsciousness and he didn't want to open his eyes, but primal instinct and the memory of pain warned him that he wasn't safe at all, that he was surrounded by danger.  Formless terror made Helo's heart leap painfully and with a shudder he opened his eyes to dazzling light.  His burnt eyes squeezed shut.  Slowly, he tried again and after a moment found that he was surrounded by flat white surfaces and shiny chrome.  He tried to sit up.  He wouldn't have made it on his own -- he felt unbalanced, as though something were missing -- but someone moved quickly to support his back and kept him from collapsing off the edge of a high bed and onto a sparkling white floor.

"Whoa!  Hey, big guy!  Take it easy," someone said in his ear.  The voice was achingly familiar.  He'd heard it almost every day for months.  It was his partner Boomer, Lieutenant Sharon Valerii and don't forget the j. g., you rook.

"Sharon?" Helo croaked.  "What are you doing here?"  Wherever here was.  Squinting, he tried to make out more of the shiny room.  It was definitely a room or a spaceship compartment.  But which?  Engine noise whined in the air like a nest of waspets.  A spaceship then, and not the Three-One-Two.  Definitely not the bare dirt and rocks of Caprica.  His last clear memory was of a forest and night and a pain in his leg as big as a rocket ship.

"I found the Galactica, buddy.  We're on the Galactica.  We came back for you."  Helo's back prop bent forward and Sharon's familiar cheerful face came into view just inches from his own, so close he could see her deep brown eyes and the fine hairs on her cheeks.  Once again he wondered how an ordinary grubby grunt like Tyrol ever hooked up with Sharon.  She was as perfect as a touchdown pass.  Helo's back was warm where he leaned against her.

Struggling to understand how and why he could possibly be on the Galactica once more, Helo said, "I remember … I remember Caprica.  After you left, we made it to the mountains and hid.  Lords, I think we must have hid for days but I had a fever from my leg and I kept dropping out of it.  What happened?"

That brought back clearer memories.  What was it?  The Cylons had shot a gaping hole in his right leg.  He remembered his blood gushing out and dripping on the Raptor's deck.

"I found you.  You're safe.  Lie back down now," Sharon said.  Her voice drew him back to the white and chrome compartment.  His dazzled eyes tried to take it in.  He'd never been to the Galactica's sickbay, but why had the Galactica risked coming back to Caprica?  And that engine noise he was hearing, it was wrong.  The Galactica didn't whine like a bug.  It roared and coughed like a prairie lion.

"How did you …?  Why?"

"Don't worry about it, soldier."  That was unmistakably Commander Adama's gravelly voice.  Helo slowly turned his aching head to see the Commander standing just inside the hatch.  "You're safe.  You're fine.  Just sleep for now."  The familiar scarred face smiled at him.  "Sleep my boy.  I'll take care of everything."

Fatigue jumped on Helo like a tackle on a quarterback.  Easing back down with Sharon supporting his shoulders, Helo's heavy eyes swung from the Commander back to the bed.  There was something wrong where his legs should be, but he was too groggy to figure it out.

He fought to remember.  There'd been pain and screaming -- he remembered the screaming more than the pain because it had embarrassed him that he couldn't control it.  But here with Sharon and the Commander, he didn't hurt, and he couldn't bring himself to ask for more.  The Commander said he'd take care of everything.  "Yes, sir.  If you say so, I will."

The black closed in again and he slept.

The two biosynthetic Cylons watched the sleeping human for a few minutes then quietly abandoned the sickbay mock up to the un-tender care of the electro-mechanoid units and proceeded down the passageway to the base star's rejuvenation station.  The station held forty other beings, many of which had faces and bodies identical to theirs.  The two biosynths paid no attention.

The male biosynth poured two cups of blue protein and then both it and the female sat down at what Cylons called a table but to a human would have looked more like an inverted volcano frozen in mid-eruption.  A true human had never seen such a table because none had ever roamed this base star, known to God and the electro-mechanoids as 3k7-m34-p7t-53.  The bio-synths referred to it by the shortened designation of 53.

Because Cylon bios imitated alives in every way, they were unable to interface electronically with God or each other and communicated with standard human speech and body language.  Perforce the two Cylon units engaged in a conversation.

"The Helo unit has accepted you as its partner," Cylon unit serial number 496h2 began.  One of 496h2's model mates had been placed as a human covert and designated Aaron Doral.  The Doral unit had been recovered from the Ragnar Ammunition Depot and was still under repair.  496h2 had no human-imitation appellation.

The other Cylon nodded to indicate agreement, bobbing up and down its long mane of black hair.  An identical unit had been designated Sharon Valerii and placed on the battlestar Galactica.  God had attempted to upgrade the Galactica's Valerii unit from a stage 1 sleeper to stage 2 sabotage operations, but apparently it was out of practical wireless range.  It was their only clue to the Galactica's whereabouts.

After Colonial Fleet personnel records had revealed the Galactica pilot Helo in a captured nest of humans, a Valerii series unit had been activated and programmed.  For all intents and purposes the freshly minted model was Lieutenant j.g. Sharon Valerii.

The Valerii device said, "The implant's doing great.  He bought the whole Commander Adama masquerade and even fell asleep on command."  After sipping its protein drink, the Valerii made a face indicating displeasure.  Unlike the 496h2, its algorithms had been updated with many years of human social interaction, and it had a full range of emotions and expressions.

496h2 answered, "He had some reservations, however.  He resisted the rescue explanation, and I believe there at the last he became aware of the amputated leg.  After we install our bio-synth, it will take five days for it to dominate the rest of his body.  Until then Helo must accept our leg as his own.  We cannot have him ripping it off in hysterical rejection.  I shall compare our session recordings to his brainwaves for non-recognition patterns.  The problem probably lies in our battlestar emulation -- sound, smell or lighting."  496h2 arose, the half-full cup of protein in its hand.

"I haven't finished eating and you're not going anywhere without me, hotshot," the Valerii said and scowled.  It hadn't recovered its good humor after waking up on a base star two days ago and discovering that it was a Cylon.  And moreover, it damned well wasn't going to chug-a-lug its dinner just because 496h2 was in a hurry.

The other Cylon immediately recognized the Valerii's scowl as a negative facial expression used to challenge rivals.  God had assigned control of Helo's conversion to the Valerii, and 496h2 saw no purpose in re-arranging God's commands.  It would be counterproductive to be perceived as a threat.  496h2 sat back down.

"No really, tell me how you feel today."  Sharon had bounced into Helo's room a half hour ago.  After fluffing his pillows, she'd given him the usual handful of meds and a glass of water, and he'd taken them without a quibble.  He felt almost human again.

Sharon said he'd been here five days.  It seemed like less.  He'd spent a lot of it asleep, the rest of it either with the doctors or with her.  When Helo saw Sharon, everything else in the whole frakked up universe faded into fog.  Neither his vague memories of running and hiding on Caprica nor his healing, aching leg compared to the joy of her presence and the singing in his body when she touched him.  She'd hypnotized him.  He'd finally admitted to himself that if it weren't for Chief Tyrol, Helo would have tried coming on to Sharon long ago.  She was as hot as a two-cubit rocket.

Sometimes Helo wondered why Tyrol and his other friends hadn't come to see him, but not for long.  Who needed friends when he had Sharon?  At least the Galactica now sounded like she was supposed to.  And Commander Adama came by every day.  He never said much, just chatted for a few minutes about nothing then left.

"I'm fine.  I'm supposed to get out of bed and try a little walking today."  He'd been amazed, but that's what the doctor had said and who was he to argue?

"I know.  I thought we'd go to the rec. room and say hi to everyone."  Taking his hand, Sharon gave it a good squeeze.  "They're all asking about you."

Helo surprised himself with his next move – using Sharon's hand, he pulled her to his chest.  With their faces just inches apart, he breathed, "I don't need them.  I need you."  Where had that come from?  It was as if someone had put the words in his mind and ordered him to say them.

His wounded leg burned like he'd stumbled into a patch of nettles, but Sharon was close and so female.

She smiled an invitation.  Her eyes were on Helo's lips.  It was wrong, but she plainly wanted him.  "What for, big guy?" she whispered and moved closer.  Her warm breath filled Helo's nose, her skin brushed his and relinquishing his will, Helo kissed her in a hot, demanding meeting of lips and tongues.

In his last rational seconds Helo thought, _This is a mistake.  Sharon is in love with someone_.  But he couldn't remember whom anymore.  Helo had lost every thought except Sharon and the tongue that was claiming him.  When her mouth broke away from his, it traveled down his body in a hot wet trail of sensation.  There was nothing else in the universe.

Just as Sharon reached her destination, Helo's wounded leg stopped burning, twitched once involuntarily then lay still.

For the man who had once been Helo, after that there was nothing at all.

From the hatch 496h2 watched the Valerii device's activities with Helo, recording for future reference her techniques and the human's reactions.

As the Valerii had postulated, a sexual engagement had effectively distracted the human from the bio-synth leg's final integration with the human system.  Now all God had to do was enunciate the final activation tones, and the amalgamation would be complete.  In the meantime 496h2 had partial control with his hand-held remote control.

"Helo, walk," the Valerii told the human and 496h2 pushed a red button.  Responding to the command, Helo sat up and stiffly slid off the bed.  At first, he would have collapsed to the floor without the Valerii's support, but in a few seconds he was able to take steps with both his human and bio-synth legs.  After a minute of pacing back and forth, the new leg's programming took complete hold and he walked without further trouble.

Only the naked and innocent may come before God, so 496h2 and the Valerii stripped to the skin, and 496h2 untied the two strings that held Helo's hospital gown closed and let it drop to the floor.  They were ready.

And God was ready for them.  Every base star had a compartment located in the nexus awaiting God's occupation.  Each huge space contained only one thing, a stepped pyramid topped by an elaborate gold and silver chaise throne.  God occupied the 53's throne and watched the three beings approaching him -- his two perfect biosynthetic children and the half human that had been so carefully prepared to join his family.

The two biosynths halted at the base of the pyramid, but the human climbed up.  Two steps from the summit he knelt and bowed his head.

The female biosynth at the base of the pyramid said, "We are finished, Lord and Master."

Creating two arms and hands to touch the human and a mouth to sing the tone, God blessed His new creation with His loving kindness.  "This is my son."  The ringing tones filled the air.

Up came the head of the brand new Cylon.  "Father," it said.  "By your command."


End file.
